Gandalf. No, seriously, wizards in fiction. As a child I read a lot, and mostly fantasy and sci-fi. I often wished I could fly, turn invisible etc. and was crushed when I discovered it was impossible. Everyone wants magic powers, right?
So I looked into it. I spent a lot of time daydreaming (a place where you CAN have magic powers) and read more and more, looking for something to indicate magic was real. Everything I found indicated magic was wishful thinking, and I went through a heavily sceptical phase, becoming a materialist atheist for my teenage years, believing magic was only real in stories.
Then I started studying philosophy. After scorning Cartesian dualism and gradually discovering what I believed (no objective truth, sense data are all we know, conceptual spectacles etc.) I realised the fiction/fact distinction might not be as reliable as I thought. The work of many philosophers, and Jung, and loads of Quantum physicists seemed to throw me into doubt. Maybe my literalist worldview was wrong, and the universe was a more complex and subtle place than I realised.
I'd been playing with the Tarot for a few years by then (my mother was a Tarot reader) and had read Castaneda, RAW and Leary, had researched Crowley & the golden dawn etc. but none of it was the fireball-and-flying-carpet magic I was looking for. So I settled for less.
Storybook magic is impossible in this reality (I reasoned) but magick (shaping the world to your will) IS possible, so I will have to lower my sights to that. I can't fly like superman, but I could get a hanglider. I can't become invisible, but I could make people not notice me. And in the meantime keep magic alive in fiction, storytelling and daydreaming, which turned out to be extremely handy magical skills in the end. If all the world's a narrative, it pays to be a storyteller.
So anyway I kept up the research, learned to read the cards properly, took a load of other ideas on board and played & ran some Mage RPGs, (essentially a shared daydream about having magic powers), as magic gradually drifted into prominence in my life. One day I realised I had a load of knowledge, magical skills and magical beliefs but virtually no conscious practice except the Tarot, and decided to call myself a magician to myself and practice when I felt like it.
I still felt as though only me, Alan Moore and Rachael Pollack really believed this stuff though, until I discovered Barbelith a few years later. This magick forum opened my eyes, and I realised there are loads of you out there, freaks like me who believe in magick. More power to you all.
Why did I get into Magic? I always had been and I just didn't know it. Oh, and listening to the Orb on acid, obviously. |
